How will enterprises evolve their high-value legacy applications to the cloud experience? Public cloud advocates say "migrate." Grizzled infrastructure pros know the poor risk/return ratio of migrations. Is there a modern approach to legacy modernization? Join us for a Crowdchat.

I think this is a services deal for IBM - IBM has a captive base of legacy apps through its services business at which it can aim Red Hat offerings - imo it's why Ginni keeps stressing the deal is not backend loaded...

hybrid cloud is achieving the same operating experience across #onprem & public #cloud workloads...multi-cloud is a symptom of #cloudcreep and is a cluster F if not managed properly. Ideally the two come together.

There's overlap (or some people may see it that way and not worth arguing to much if they do). At core, hybrid is centered around on-premises + cloud(s) while multicloud is centered around cloud options (likely multiple or at least planning for multiple even if not yet)

- Multi-cloud to me means that multiple execution venues are in play for your business / enterprise. Hybrid cloud = multi-cloud with orchestration and automation to move things between execution venues.

Hybrid cloud is mix of customer's private data center and off premise public and/or private cloud from a particular vendor. Multi cloud is mashup of public and/or private cloud from different vendors including on prem private cloud.

Multi-cloud is where all the data lies in different clouds. "True Hybrid cloud" allows those multi-clouds to be integrated by enabling the movement of code and data between cloud instantiations, and execute the code.

"Hybrid cloud" extends your on-premises private-cloud assets (data, storage, compute, etc) through on-demand subscription access to resources in at least one public cloud. Multi-cloud" might use two or more clouds in a common application (eg AWS for ETL, Azure for BI).

Multi-cloud might involve a private cloud sharing data & workloads with two or more public clouds. A multi-cloud might be a federation on private clouds hubbed by a public cloud (eg B2B supply chain with managed SaaS hub).

I could argue neither of these things really exist. Organizations are just doing what they've always done - choosing the best solution to solve a particular problem or exploit a particular opportunity.

certain parts of the tech industry have an (unhelpful - in my opinion) urge to put labels on thing in order to align their products against these labels. In my experience customers rarely get up in the morning and think 'i need some multi-cloud'

Usually, we understand "multi-cloud" at a particular interoperability level (eg moving VMs back and forth among two or more IaaS cloud services). But multi-cloud can also mix distinct IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings. Or interop diff IaaS with Kubernetes with serverless

embrace automation. Build trust. The most successful teams that bring in DevOps processes and really get true velocity increase have both hight trust culture and broad use of automation. Let the machines to the work :)

Get the data architecture right before you modernize. e.g. in UK public sector we have depts with unique identifiers that are HNS number, national insurance number, driving licence number or passport number - a common data architecture will provide much value later

From doing more than 100 DC audits and several migrations + transformations many lessons were learned: biggest one: Move Apps as Is then Transform. Transform Phases -> Infra Led -> Process Led -> App Led.

Focus on refactoring your application into distinct capabilities at a granularity you want to have the flexibility to upgrade, scale, secure, & manage independently of the full app stack going forward.

- the most important question to focus on is which applications are "secret sauce" vs. offering no undifferentiated value. The second category should be outsourced physically or logically. The first category should be optimized and modernized.

- Agreed. This is one of the areas I agree with @CTOadvisor on. It should start with your data management strategy. Another consideration is how important workload portability is to the CIO and business.

- Agreed. The first question customers are looking to answer is whethere there's a SaaS option that meets the spirit of the legacy applications requirements so they can "outsource" it and focus on business value vs. software development & infrastructure.

For most enterprises this is an initial look at the tools and options for creating a hybrid cloud environment. The main players here are VMware, Microsoft Azure Stack and Oracle. They all have some True Hybrid Cloud capabilities.

They have been trying to to that for last 2-3 years, some brave should have moved SAP instances to cloud already. Mass migration will be a slow progression. Migrations are the messiest part of #cloud adoption.

attended a great IBM event in Toronto and one company shared a "cloud-native" transformation but were 100% on-prem. That was prep for moving to cloud and releasing the limits on their apps bound by traditional dev models

This needs to be a pragmatic migration. Most of the new workloads are being developed as #cloudnative and most of the low hanging fruit that can be migrated easily has already been moved to the #cloud. Meaning that what is left is the challenging stuff

When doing migrations, the first thing which must happen is Application Portfolio Analysis. Reason is that you ease into cloud consumption as your people and processes have to change as well. So go slow in the beginning. handle low hanging fruit while youu adapt

We've got dozens of large enterprises coming back around after having failed a DIY cloud management approach. They are finding the need to focus more on those apps and less on trying to be experts across platforms.

wondering what other folks are seeing as priorities for legacy apps? It seems like the vendors (MSFT, SAP, ORCL) are providing clearer pathways for their suites to migrate to cloud - so in general do homegrown ERPs have bigger headwinds to move to cloud?

Great question! Another way of framing it is "what will migrate/what will be substituted for: apps, VMs, infrastructure?" Obviously more nuanced than that, but that is a central question for a lot of 2019 IT strategies.

@sarbjeetjohal Yes. Migrating a huge legacy application to cloud, if it makes economic sense, may also involve replatforming, refactoring, and rearchitecting for containers/K8s etc. This stuff takes time, money, people to get it right without compromising service lvls & security

@BobWambach1 Homegrown ERP has bigger "headwind" for migration to cloud because the enterprise needs to DIY its own migration tooling/strategy. With packaged ERP, especially if its SAP or Oracle trying to migrate you to their clouds, they provide the tools/PS for that.